3. Making Money, Keeping the Parish Alive

Abstract

This chapter is about how fundraising is a devotional practice. Dollars and cents are not secondary to Catholic devotion but are intertwined with intergenerational bonds between men, loyalties to the church, and ideas about survival and community longevity. Counting, collecting, and soliciting money is religious work. Discourses of life and death sacralize money and valorize men’s labor as productive and vital. Keeping the parish alive then becomes a masculine duty. This chapter takes readers backstage in the money room at the feast and through embodied ethnography explores how parishioners are trained in money work. Following the labor of one man, it explores how money work is a calling and how it binds feast organizers to the parish and implicates them in the labor of sustaining the church. This chapter unpacks men’s organizational labor and constructions of “productivity” and “dedication” to consider how they embody masculinities through working for the church.